Waiting For Aid: Students and their families weigh life-changing college decisions amid delays and technical difficulties with the revamped FAFSA  — the government’s gateway to any federal aid for prospective college students

Instead of being out with friends at 10:30 p.m. on a Saturday night in January, senior triplets Adam, Chris and Reid Minto sat hunched over their laptops in the family living room with their parents.

“Adam, have you tried yet?” Page refresh. “I’m trying, Chris are you in?”

“No, reload again.”

Five computers were open to the same online form: the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, that was redesigned this year for the first time in decades.

But the worst part for the family is not knowing where the brothers can afford to go to college with less than a month until college enrollment deadlines. The triplets have been checking their financial aid portals every day since March to see if their delayed financial decisions have arrived. 

“I understand that they wanted to make the application easier, but these changes are painful,” Adam said. “The not-knowing is incredibly stressful. It’s highs and lows — we’re getting accepted to colleges, but then it’s anxiety of how much are these schools going to cost?”

The FAFSA — the government’s gateway to any federal aid for prospective college students — is delayed and strewn with technical difficulties this application season due to a legislation-mandated revamp of an outdated form, forcing students and their families to weigh life-changing college decisions without knowing their future financial situation. 

The Mintos had originally planned to complete the FAFSA in October, when the form has opened for the past 40 years, but its opening was delayed to December, then January. Now, thanks to further delays in processing time, only a fraction of colleges have received FAFSA data necessary for financial aid decisions.

Financial Aid Expert Brendan Williams at uAspire, a national nonprofit committed to increasing college access, calls the FAFSA the “key to unlocking financial aid for college” because it can determine the three main sources of funding: federal, state-based and institutional aid. He says the unprecedented changes this year have caused a great increase in stress for the dozens of families he works with.

“With the delays and other technology issues, it’s been the hardest FAFSA year that I’ve ever been a part of in over 10 years,” Williams said. “The FAFSA hasn’t undergone an overhaul of this magnitude in at least 30 years.”

The FAFSA overhaul began four years ago during a bipartisan push to reform a financial aid application that hadn’t been updated in decades. In December 2020, Congress passed the FAFSA Simplification Act as part of the end-of-year budget, so Williams saw the changes coming and anticipated an easier FAFSA this year. The Department of Education was allocated funds and tasked by legislators to implement a new form using a more modern coding language that doesn’t run on an archaic IBM mainframe, as well as reducing the questions on the form from 100 to less than 40.

“Most of the issues are honestly with the rollout and implementation of the changes, not exactly the changes themselves,” Williams said. “It certainly seems like the Department of Education needs a little bit more funding to make a better product. If we’re passing laws and requiring the DOE to make certain changes, we need to ensure that we’re funding them.”

The FAFSA has historically begun to send financial information to colleges by Oct. 4 and has been due on June 30. This year, the application is still due on June 30, but colleges only began receiving financial information from the FAFSA in mid-March, according to the Department of Education.

“Students used to have financial aid offers by this time of the year, so they could actually understand how much they’re going to pay for college,” Williams said. “But right now colleges don’t have the FAFSA information. Financial aid offers might not come out until from the early to mid-May at the earliest for schools that rely on the FAFSA, forcing students to make one of the most expensive decisions of their life in a shrunken timeline.”

The delay in aid packages has caused stress for students like senior tennis player Ellie McDermed, who is waiting for her FAFSA results before committing to a college. She submitted the form in January and all of her athletic and academic scholarship offers were finalized last month, but she’s waiting for need-based aid to determine which colleges she can realistically afford. 

Her commitment deadline of May 1 was pushed back to May 15 in consideration of the FAFSA issues. Still, McDermed says her stress about college has doubled due to the FAFSA issues, even compared to the athletic recruiting process itself with tournaments, campus visits and calls with coaches.

“Two months ago, I realized that all I’m waiting for is the FAFSA,” McDermed said. “I’m in contact with schools, and I need to tell these coaches my plans soon but I’m still waiting for FAFSA. For someone who is a student athlete who maintains high grades, I just wish I was done with this instead of being stuck.”

Senior Ayden Beverage-Calvin is already committed to the University of Kansas to study pre-business, but he’s still concerned by the delayed FAFSA. He’s set to receive his financial aid package in May. But to him, May is too late — his housing accommodations deadline already passed on April 1, forcing him to make decisions about where he’s living next year without complete financial information. 

Plus, he’s worried about making enough money this summer to cover both housing and tuition, but he believes that the worst part is that he doesn’t know how worried to be.

“If I had my financial aid information, I would know how many jobs I need to work this summer,” Beverage-Calvin said. “Maybe I should be working more now, but I don’t know. At this point, I’m assuming that I’ll be working two jobs from graduation until the first day of college. I was already stressed about paying for college, and the uncertainty is making it that much worse.”

On top of delays, technical problems have prevented students from successfully completing the FAFSA. In recent years, around 1.9 million students nationwide complete a form by March, according to the National FAFSA Tracker, but so far only 1.3 million students have submitted the FAFSA this year — a 30% decrease.

FAFSA Consultant Camry Ivory is the Kansas City-area representative for the Missouri College & Career Attainment Network, a nonprofit that helps students access postsecondary education. She’s been helping students submit the FAFSA for 15 years, and she partly attributes the drop in FAFSA submissions to technical issues. 

Ivory runs weekly FAFSA workshops at local schools where she helps around 30 families fill out their FAFSA forms at a time. She says the majority of families this year have left the hour-long workshops without successfully submitting due to unresolved errors. In previous years, most of her workshop attendees would successfully file their FAFSA in less than 15 minutes.

“My job is to help students apply for aid and find scholarships, but recently I spend most of my time troubleshooting technical issues,” Ivory said. “I’ve become less of a financial aid expert and more like an IT consultant. It’s been really hard for us professionals to constantly not know the answer and tell families that they have to wait to find out life-changing information. I can’t give them any guarantees anymore.”

Another major change to the FAFSA this year, according to Williams, is the replacement of the former “Expected Family Contribution” calculation with a different formula yielding a “Student Aid Index.” Unlike the EFC, the SAI doesn’t take into account the number of children in one family that are in college, meaning households with multiple children in college are no longer guaranteed more federal financial aid.

“It was presented sort of as a name change, but the backend formula also changed quite a bit,” Williams said. “This is seriously impacting families with multiple kids, especially twins, triplets and quadruplets.”

For the Minto triplets, this new lack of aid is devastating as they wait to hear back from the delayed FAFSA.

“Paying for college is hard enough, but paying for three colleges all at once is tough,” Adam said. “In November, I had a list of colleges that I was interested in, and cost was not on the forefront of my mind. Now that I understand the FAFSA changes, I’ve started to keep a spreadsheet of tuition, room and board and other expenses and have narrowed it down to only a few affordable options.”

The technical glitches making the form take weeks to finish — instead of the hour it would’ve taken in past years — were a minor annoyance to the Mintos. A new formula change, giving families with multiple children less aid, has caused more major distress.

The lessened aid for multiple children families is also stressing East parent Beth O’Bryan’s family as her high school senior daughter Hallie applies for federal aid with an older daughter already in college. She’s nervous to receive less aid than she expected before the switch to SAI. 

O’Bryan remembers filing a FAFSA for her first daughter three years ago without issues, but the family has been unable to file a form this year due to technical issues. They’ve been trying to submit since the first day the form opened.

“Over the past two months, we haven’t been able to link my IRS data and account to Hallie’s to submit the form,” O’Bryan said. “I’ve sent multiple emails, many chats and have been calling but there’s a message of a high volume of calls and there isn’t even an option to hold. It’s a loop with no answers that really stresses me out.”

According to Ivory, many families have experienced issues linking parent and student accounts due to the Department of Education’s new collaboration with the IRS meant to transfer parent financial information directly to the FAFSA. Though the change was meant to streamline data entry, she says the rollout has been riddled with errors.

“In past years, technically one person could go in and do everything,” Ivory said. “But this year, the student has to do their section and the parent has to do their section, they’re completely separate. Unfortunately, oftentimes the student and parent are doing everything right but the connection won’t go through.”

Senior Bella Stowe is experiencing this error and worries about exactly how many loans she’ll need to take out next year to afford school. She committed to Drake University to study nursing in December and has been trying to file a FAFSA since January.

“On my end, the form says that my mom needs to finish her portion,” Stowe said. “But on her end, it says that I need to finish my portion. I’ve tried every week, and I guess I’ll keep trying.”

The Department of Education recommends for families waiting for FAFSA results to use financial aid calculators to estimate aid in the meantime, but some don’t trust the reliability of the calculators, including the Mintos and the O’Bryans.

“When we did the FAFSA with [our oldest daughter], we used the calculator beforehand which gave us an estimate of what would be reasonable for us to pay for her college,” O’Bryan said. “And I’ll just say we’re paying a lot more than the estimate.”

Ivory hopes that this is the “worst FAFSA season ever” and that the form will be improved for next year. In the meantime, as college commitment deadlines approach this May and June, Ivory recommends that students having trouble filing a FAFSA reach out for help through online resources and contacting MOCAN experts for free.

“Ultimately, families shouldn’t feel defeated or that they aren’t smart or don’t deserve financial aid,” Ivory said. “This is a challenge for everybody this year. It’s really important that students advocate for themselves if they’re going to miss deadlines and communicate that with colleges. We’re finding that most colleges understand that the FAFSA issues are out of our control. The best thing families can do is just reach out for help.”